Forgotten Ground Regained

Styles and Themes

Modern alliterative poetry comes in many forms. Some alliterative poets try to strictly imitate the historical, Anglo--Saxon or Old Norse forms. Others adopt looser, or different forms. Some alliterative poets emphasize themes that reflect historical contexts -- the Germanic Dark Ages, or the chivalric High Middle Ages, or their reflection in modern fantasy literature, or in their reenactment via the Society for Creative Anachronism. Others apply alliterative forms to more modern themes and situations. This page tries to give you something of a map of this territory, using both poems on this site and some poems posted elsewhere on the web.
Anglo-Saxon Meter
The following poems from this site follow Old English metrical patterns fairly well:
Tolkien's poetry, of course, also follows Anglo-Saxon metrics, including poems from the Lord of the Rings, such as The Prophecy of the Paths of the Dead, Eomer's Battle Song, Fangorn's "Lore of Living Creatures", The Riding of the Rohirrim, Theoden's Call to Arms, The Song of Eorl the Young, The Mounds of Mundberg, The Riding Song of the Rohirrim, Eomer's Wrath, and and of course, his long alliterative poems like The Fall of Arthur.
However, Tolkien's best alliterative work may be his alliteraive verse drama, The Homecoming of Beortnoth Beorhthelm's-Son, which can be found ina small collection of his work, Leaf by Niggle.
Other longer works that follow Anglo-Saxon norms include C.S. Lewis' The Nameless Isle in his collected Narrative Poems, John Heath Stubb's Artorius and Rahul Gupta's Arthuriad. Rahul Gupta's contributions to this site (Gleipnir: To Bind the Wolf, The Illuminated Manuscript, and Volung's Revenge) follow alliterative meter in its strictest form.
There are also a variety of poems in fantasy novels that at least roughly follow Anglo-Saxon metrics. Perhaps the most striking is The Death of Bowie Gizzardsbane from John Myers Myers' fantasy novel Silverlock. Both the poem and the novel are utterly not to be missed. Patrick Rothfuss is another example. See for examples poems like Sought We the Scrivani, or Fast Came Our Fela. There is a long history of alliterative verse in the speculative fiction community that is outlined in depth by Dennis Wise in the following articles:
Old Norse Forms
At base, Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse are very similar, but there were a range of specialized forms such as drottkvatt that are distinctively Norse. These are often technically very hard to replicate in modern English, but that is only a challenge to the dedicated poet! Poems on this site that follow strict Norse forms include Do you know the way to Ziq-Zhafei?, Omertá, and Plebeian. Norse forms are also quite popular in the Society for Creative Anachronism. An early example was the Lilies Saga, written by "Harald Isenross" and "Mathurin Kebusso" (the name of the character the authors play as SCA members). More technically correct examples can be found in he work of such SCA poets as Robert Cuthbert, Michael Dixon, Anne Etkin, Jere Fleck, David Friedman, M. Wendy Hennequin, Anna Keveney, Daniel Marsh, Peter Olsen, Diana Paxson, John Ruble, Mary K. Savelli, Ron Snow, Sandra B. Straubhaar, Beth Morris Tanner, Christie Ward, Frida Westford, and Paul Edwin Zimmer.
Much of their work is available in Dennis Wise's critical anthology of alliterative verse.
Middle English Alliterative Verse (And the Road to the Future)
Middle English is a lot closer rhythmically to modern English than either Anglo-Saxon or Norse, which means that poems that compromise on strict Anglo-Saxon or Norse rules often sound a lot more like Middle English forms. The use of rhyming couplets after a block of alliterating long lines is a specifically Middle English form that shows up in a lot of looser modern alliterative verse. Some poems, like my poem, Aislin's Ride, follow the bob-and-wheel pattern we see in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A lot of my other poems are of this general type, including Freeway Dawn, Welcome to Our Website, and What a Perfect Poem (which, very consciously, imitates the 15th century flyting form, used for poetical abuse). It's quite possible to get futher from Ango-Saxon verse than that and still use alliteratoin as a basic organizing principle. Take a look, for example, at Whiplashed Sonnet, or my Tolkien fan-fiction epic, The Redemption of Daeron, where the poetry is still deeply alliterative, but with its iambic tetrameter lines is closer to the metrics of Pearl than to those of Anglo-Saxon or Norse verse. At the far end, you get to free verse with rich alliteration, as in Sea Change, Lullabyes, or Song for a Seeker. Or at least, something closer to the kinds of rhythms and alliteration we see in Gerard Manley Hopkin's Pied Beauty. There are a broad range of possibilities. They have yet to be fully explored.

Themes

Historical Themes
````Alliterative verse has a lot of associations in people's minds with the popular romanticization of the Middle Ages -- with stirring tales of heroism, chivalric romances, and themes that go with that social milieu, such as courage, death, loyalty, and love (or, for that matter, riddles). There are plenty of examples of that in the poems on (or linked to) from this site, though somewhat more surprising is the use of alliterative forms to translate classical Greek and Latin poems, often amazingly effectively.````
Perhaps most striking is the number of people who are not named J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis who are writing book-length, alliterative epics. Not just modernist recyclings of alliterative forms (Age of Anxiety, Brotherhood of Men) or traditional British material like the legend of Arthur (Artorius, The Arthuriad) or tales of an ancient Britain that never was (Sigurd's Lament). There is now an alliterative epic about the life of the Baháʼu'lláh, and a sequence of modern alliterative treatments of material from the Bible (The Song of Joseph, The Song of Daniel, A Verse Vigil, Tree of Life). I must, of course, plead guilty to the same temptation, which in my case took the form of a cycle of alliterative poems and epics set in the shadow of the Silmarillion (The Song of Marwen and Fithurin, The Song of Woe, The Song of Returning, The Song of Shadows, and The Redemption of Daeron), and poems reprising material from Psalms (A Cry to Heaven, All the Air is Shattered) and Acts (Fifty Days Further).
Lyric Descriptions and Personal Meditations
What's striking, though, is how often contributors to this site have used alliterative verse to describe natural scenes and physical settings (often, in terms that are explicitly modern and lyrical) Read, for example, Along the Missouri, April Fools, Do You Know the Way to Zhiq-Zhafei, Freeway Dawn, Fugue for Toy Piano, Not Rattling, Omerta, Plebeian, Rosemary, Sea Change, The Birch Canoe, What the Eagle Fan Says, Whiplashed Sonnet, or White. This kind of evocative description is perfectly compatible with the historical associations of alliterative verse, but it makes room for more personal themes and concerns.
Using alliterative verse for lyric descriptions, personal meditations, and the like opens the way for alliterative verse to become part of the toolkit of the working poet in an entirely modern context. I think we are seeing the beginnings of that in some of the published work I link to on this site. This may take the form of highly alliterative free verse. See, for example, Amanda Gorman's inauguration poem, "The Hill We Climb" Rebecca Henry Lowndes' collection Years and other Leavings (or Scott King's All Graced in Green, orA.M Juster's Wonder and Wrath, or Steven Scaer's Pumpkin Chucking, which do contain some strictly alliterative poems, such as "Three Visitors", or "Wendell"). Some younger free verse poets seem to be constantly on the verge of writing in alliterative verse (see, for example, Anindita Sengupta's "In Bend, Oregon", or Damien Durrell's "Ça Suffit!"). In fact, there seem to have been quite a few alliterative poems written in recent years by practicing poets -- witness Annie Finch's "Another Reluctance", Luke Stromberg's poem "Family First" in The Elephant's Mouth, Steve Ely's poem "Big Billy" in Englaland, Timothy Green's "The Museum of Estrangement", "Poem for the Millenium" in Charles Martin's Signs and Wonders, Adam O. Davis' "Interstate Highway System", "Nine of Swords" and "Four of Wands" in Michael McAfee's Tarot Poems and quite a few others. A common pattern in the work of practicing poets who usually write free verse is for their alliterative poetry to be deployed for special effect. For instance, Maryann Corbett
has written quite a few alliterative poems, such as "Cold Case", "Spoonspell", "Suburban Samsara", "The Birds of Ancient Battlefields Visit the Suburbs" , and "From Third Storm Riddle: Hurricane"). Her entire corpus of collections -- Breath Control (2012), Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter (2013), Mid Evil (2015), Street View (2017), In Code (2020), and The O In the Air (2023) contains alliterative verse, but there are usually only one or two alliterative poems in each collection.
But there are now quite a few poets who write alliterative verse by preference. I would give as examples books like Ian Crockatt's Skald - Sword & Sea-Cloud, Lancelot Schaubert's The Greenwood Poet, or Tom Branfoot's Boar, where a large proportion of the poetry is truly alliterative, and the poet has clearly chosen to use the "heroic", alliterative meter for poetic effect. See, for example, Lancelot Schaubert's poems A Storm Assaults Greenwood Chapel, A Problem with Growing Things, The Power of the Italian Journal of Agronomy, Root River, and Glacier Graves. Oh, by the way, we have just seen the publication of what may very well be the first chldren's picture book in alliterative verse, Bea Wolf. (You have to read the sample!) Is there a 21st-Century alliterative revival? You bet there is!
Copyright © Paul D Deane, 2023